With the advance of technology, users have been able to browse a larger amount of information than before. Moreover, with the improvement of graphic expression techniques, it has become possible to express information in various regions of various types and shapes such as, for example, a circle or a polygon as well as in a rectangular region.
As a first technique enabling users to browse a large amount of information, there is a technique that uses a scroll bar in which a bar region is provided in a part of a display region, and a scroll box is disposed within the bar region. The use of this type of scroll bar enables users to know the browsing position within the entirety of the information.
As a second technique, an information display method in which data is arranged along an axis without using a scroll bar, and users can freely change (enlarge or reduce) the scale of the axis is disclosed in NPL 1. In the information display method disclosed in NPL 1, a linear axis is set, and thumbnails are mapped onto the axis based on features to thereby visualize data distribution. In this case, data of which the features are similar are arranged to be distributed over a plurality of lines having different thumbnail sizes so that the thumbnails do not overlap each other. According to this arrangement, when a user changes (for example, expands the axis) the scale of the axis, thumbnails are moved from the lower lines so as to fill the gaps between open thumbnails to thereby maintain an appropriate display density.
As a third technique, a terminal in which it is possible to monitor portions which are not displayed without providing a scroll bar at an edge of a screen to thereby more effectively use a display region of a display portion is disclosed in PTL 1. The terminal disclosed in PTL 1 calculates the number of dots (a remaining image size) in the vertical direction of the portions which are not displayed on the display portion from the size of a displayed image and the display size of the display portion. Moreover, the terminal edits the screen so that a region (an area suggesting an image range) indicating the residual image size is displayed on the display portion based on the calculated residual image size.